What IS Positive Parenting?
For me, Positive Parenting is an effective, nurturing, and powerful approach to parenting. It is based on the principals of feeding your child(ren)’s emotional needs, building opportunities for connection which helps to prevent the need for correction, using positive values-based language, reframing to look at your child’s strengths rather than weaknesses.
What Positive Parenting is not:
· a false sense of positivity glossing over the negative or bad stuff
· pretending you and your family live in a rose-tinted world
· it is not about spoiling your child or letting them have their own way all the time
· it is not about letting them run wild without boundaries or consequences
· letting your kids get away with everything and ruling the roost
Austrian psychologist Alfred Alder whose work from the 1900s believed that children have a need to feel connected to those around them. Children thrive when they are in a responsive and interactive environment and as a result are less likely to seek attention for the wrong reasons. Alder’s work built the roots for positive parenting that we see today.
Here are some simple tips to bring more of the Positive Parenting principals to your everyday interactions with your children:
Be Curious
Parenting is all about being curious rather than judgmental, our children depending on their developmental age and additional needs are rarely being emotional, defiant, or misbehaving to get at us! It is usually the tip of the iceberg of other underlying causes that have been missed or perceived as something else. Put on your curiosity radar and look for patterns, times of the day or indeed days of the week when emotions are higher, behaviour is worse. Look at the role you play in this as well are you supporting or fueling what is going on in your homes? Hunger, tiredness, overwhelm? Next step, what are you going to do to support your families or to encourage your child to help themselves?
Connection before correction
At our fundamental core, we as a human race, want to be noticed and connect with others. However, as parents we often notice the wrong stuff, the bad behaviour, the talking back, the messy bedroom and forget to take in or comment on the good stuff. Our children want out attention and if they learn they get your undivided attention when you need to correct them, they will play to this so that they can be noticed. How can you tune into your child and connect with them so ultimately you don’t need to correct them at all, I know what you are thinking ‘we can only dream’ but really it works. Keep a diary for a week of all the bumps in the road that goes on in your home, is there a pattern? Would a moment of connection, anticipation or planning have prevented those moment from occurring?
Praise
Praise is a powerful tool to bring about change in your families. Use it, mean it and catch your child(ren) being good. It is not about false bravado and building them up for the sake of it. It is acknowledging the journey perhaps that they have been on to get to an end point or not doing something to the same degree as they did before. Praise really is a parents best friend.
The best way to bring more Positive Parenting to your family is to try, none of us are the perfect parent not even me, a positive parenting coach, but practice really does make it all feel more natural. Commit to one of the tips above and work on putting it in place every day this month. Once you have mastered this or it becomes part of your automatic parenting (you know what I mean, the parenting you can do when working on automatic pilot!) then add something else.
